0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Beatmania Append 6th Mix + Core Remix

Beatmania Append 6th Mix + Core Remix is the final release for the Beatmania series on the original Playstation, containing both the 6^th Mix and the Core Remix releases. As with previous entries in the series it was developed and published by Konami, and releases exclusively in Japan on the 31^st of January 2002.

Notable people who worked on Beatmania Append 6th Mix + Core Remix, Fumiaki Tanaka who has had a long history with the Beatmania franchise as well as other Konami music/rhythm games up to 2009, working as Executive Producer.

In 2010 was the first time Tanaka has moved away from these types of games, with his work on Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker as Executive Producer. Two years later he would be credited in the same role for NeverDead, before heading back to the Metal Gear series, first working as Executive Producer on the spin off Metal Gear Rising Revengeance and Metal Gear Solid V Ground Zeroes.

This section won’t have much new information, below you will find the previously posted gameplay information, with Beatmania Append 6th + Core Remix a DLC style add on for the base Beatmania game that was released back in 2001. Unlike previous append disc that required the first disc of Append Mix 2, the 6^th mix will allow you to play all previously released append disc.

 

The 6^th Mix and Core Remix were the latest arcade releases for the Beatmania series, the game contains all of the tracks from both arcade releases, in addition there are also half a dozen new remixes from the Yebisu Mix append disc bringing the total number of tracks in this edition up to 62 this number also includes the long version of certain tracks.

Gameplay wise it is more or less identical to the original Beatmania release. The game came with its own custom controller, modelled after the Arcade version of the game, you have five keys that resemble those of a piano, these key are positioned vertically, the keys are also colour coded the same way as well with three of the keys being white while two are black.

 

Alongside the keys on the controller is the turntable, the player is able to turn or scratch the turntable, the game also supports standard controllers as well. With turntable movement and scratching keyed to the circle and triangle buttons, piano key are controlled using the D-Pad Left, Square Button, X button as well as the shoulder buttons the game has a key config menu.

Each of the keys or buttons have a corresponding vertical bar on the screen, as does the turntable, each of the bars indicate the path in which rectangular icons cascade downwards towards a horizontal line near the botton. The aim for the player is to hit the corresponding key or rotate the turntable when the icon reaches and matches with this horizontal line.

 

When hitting the corresponding key or button you will be graded on how well you have done with Great, Good, Bad and Poor appearing on screen, the better you do the more audience satisfaction you will receive, miss time your button or key presses and turntable scratches will result in your audience satisfaction decreasing.

The Audience satisfaction is displayed by a red and green bar, the audience satisfaction bar does not go from red to blue as you would expect, the green part of the bar is the lower audience satisfaction with the player needing to get into the small red section at the end of the bar in order to pass the song and move on to the next one.

Upon completion of the song/level, the player is awarded a score which is money, also show is the total number of notes and how the player performed on each of those notes, breaking it down into accuracy levels Poor, Bad, Good, Great and an additional Great+, next to each of these is the number of notes hit at the various accuracy levels. in addition to being a single player game up to 2 players can play.

  

 

This being a Japanese only release, critic reviews for this game are none existent, so we head over to GameFAQs for their user ratings. We find that Beatmania Append 6^th mix + Core Remix is currently sitting on an average user rating of 2.85/5 from a total of 13 user ratings.

Unlike recently covered entries in the series, the 6^th mix while having plenty of high user ratings, it also has its fair share of negative ones with a near 50/50 split between positive scores and negative scores. With a large chunk of those negative scores giving the game just a 0.5/5, one user deemed the game slightly better scoring it at a 1.5/5.

From here user ratings take a jump up with another one user rating the game at a very solid 4/5, another couple of users rated the game at a 4.5/5, while the remaining four users rated the game at the full 5/5. Next we move on to the games difficulty level, where we find a major drop in user numbers to just 5 rating this category, as with the previous two games in the series it has a unanimous just right difficulty rating.

Lastly we have the games lifespan, and like the 5^th Mix it does not give us an accurate assessment of the games lifespan, with only 5 users rating this category with a four to one split in favour of the game being 80 hours lone opposes to a 40 hour game length. Averaging out this comes in at the game having an 80 hour average lifespan.

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit four online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com, eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to, I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, Ebay has now been dropped unless the game is unavailable at other retailers.

So lets get down to business with Gamedude, who unsurprisingly don’t stock this Japanese only release, the same goes for Retrogames.co.uk and eStarland.com, so we now head over to Amazon.com in a last hope of finding a copy of the game.

 

Arriving at Amazon.com we find a pretty good supply of the game available, but I notice straight away that the 6^th Mix + Core Remix is significantly more expensive that previous entries in the series. There is also a quality drop as well with more acceptable condition copies on the market, still plenty of copy in good or better condition however, with prices starting at $31.06 for a very good condition copy.

A large chunk of the used copies are priced from this up to around the $40 mark, with the usual few going above this price point and topping out at around $63. From here we move on to the new copies, where we find a decent number on offer. If however you are looking to buy one of these the price takes a steep jump from the Used prices, with the cheapest currently on offer coming in at $116.70, with prices for a new copy currently pushing as high as $151.50.

Written by

P J Gibbon